It is widely known that the right wing in this country believes that the mass media is hopelessly liberal. So, who broke the Clinton email scandal? Was it Fox? Who gave cover for the Iraq invasion?

It is the nature of journalism to Get The Story And Get There First. It has very little to do with a paper’s ostensible lean one way or another; if it bleeds, it leads. If the NYT didn’t cover Email-gate, someone else would have. The Bush administration would have shopped the Iraq hype to someone else if Judith Miller hadn’t been so happy to help. Now, I watch MSNBC. This week, once they ran out of snowstorm coverage and reporting non-stories, they were breathlessly trying to get the bottom of Email-gate. I just saw an exasperated Lanny Davis try to defend Clinton from Tamron Hall. On the MSNBC website, Email-gate and the scramble to do damage control is on the splash in giant typeface.

Folks, there’s a liberal and conservative media, but on the whole mass media will report anything as long as it is salacious, partisanship be damned. The order of the day is not journalism, not digging deep, it’s parroting the dominant narrative. As Frank Zappa said:

Take your TV tube and eat it
‘N all that phony stuff on sports
‘N all the unconfirmed reports
You know I watched that rotten box
Until my head begin to hurt
From checkin’ out the way
The newsman say they get the dirt
Before the guys on channel so-and-so

And further they assert
That any show they’ll interrupt
To bring you news if it comes up
They say that if the place blows up
They will be the first to tell,
Because the boys they got downtown
Are workin’ hard and doin’ swell,
And if anybody gets the news
Before it hits the street,
They say that no one blabs it faster
Their coverage can’t be beat